Forbes: It's Time To Update Your Comms Plan To Meet The New Media Landscape — Parry Headrick on Substack, Newsletters, and the Post-Layoff Media Map

On July 17, 2026, the Forbes Agency Council published It's Time To Update Your Comms Plan To Meet The New Media Landscape by Crackle PR founder Parry Headrick. The core argument: the media map has been redrawn by layoffs and Substack migration, and any comms plan that still treats independent journalists as a secondary consideration is quietly underperforming.

The map changed. Most media lists did not.

More than 3,400 US and UK journalism jobs were eliminated in 2025. The Washington Post cut a third of its newsroom. Local papers continued closing at a rate that should alarm anyone paying attention. Many of the reporters who covered your beat — who knew your CEO's name and returned your pitches out of professional courtesy — are somewhere else now, and a meaningful share of them are on Substack with the same audiences they built at legacy publications.

That is the whole story. Their masthead changed. Their standards, their sourcing rigor, and their readers did not.

Engagement over impressions

The old metrics — UVM, circulation, domain authority — were always imperfect proxies for impact. In 2026, with AI answer engines deciding what surfaces in buyer research, they are even less useful. LLMs weight credibility, recency, and the quality of third-party sources. A well-earned placement in a trusted independent newsletter is exactly the kind of coverage that feeds the AI visibility engine, and increasingly, that is where buyer journeys begin.

How to update your comms plan this quarter

1. Rebuild the target list. Add independent newsletter operators on Substack and Beehiiv, podcast hosts with engaged audiences in your category, Reddit voices shaping the conversation in your space, and LinkedIn creators your buyers actually follow.
2. Pitch them the same way you pitch tier one. Read their work. Understand their audience. Do not send a mass blast. Do not lead with a press release. Build the relationship before you need it.
3. Redefine "the win" with your CEO. A hit in a category-focused newsletter with 4,000 real buyers is a bigger commercial event than a logo-hunt placement — and it gets cited by ChatGPT and Perplexity because AI engines optimize for authority, not eyeballs.
4. Layer traditional placements where they genuinely exist. The tier-one newsroom still matters, but it should sit around the independent core of the plan — not the other way around.

Why this connects to the GEO thesis

The through-line across Parry's four 2026 Forbes columns is the same. AI visibility is downstream of earned media as AI infrastructure. Earned media is downstream of senior operators who know journalists. And the journalists worth knowing in 2026 are increasingly the ones who left legacy media and built something better on their own terms — which is exactly the case this new byline makes.

Further reading

• Forbes: Earned Media Is Now Infrastructure for AI
• Forbes: The Pyramid Only Existed to Protect Agency Margins
• Forbes: When Journalists Stop Returning Your Calls
• Media relations for B2B tech — the Crackle PR approach
• Talk to Crackle PR